alt Hacker NewsCompletely agree, having worked with engineers and scientists for a large part of my career.
Programming is still in this goofy phase as a profession/industry where lots of practitioners interpret suffering and complexity and difficulty as signals of underlying quality.
There are still large numbers of programmers who see advances in human-computer interaction and tools as basically childish, because what matters to them is the feeling of machismo they get while programming, rather than whether their efforts make their users more successful.
See the pushback against IDEs (as you said), syntax highlighting (“syntax highlighting is for children”), Rust (“_I_ know how to manage memory, everyone else is an idiot who needs to git gud”), types generally (“_I_ don’t make type errors”). Even high level languages and garbage collection were met with similar derision when they were going mainstream. There are so many examples of this throughout the history of programming.
If something is hard to do, or resulted in something impressively complex rather than something underwhelmingly simple, it must be good.
Basically, we’re still a very immature profession and it’ll take time before we shed the “the most important thing about programming is that I get to be a wizard” stuff. The users care that the bridge doesn’t fall down when they drive over it. The users don’t care whether designing the bridge made me feel powerful and wizardly because I used a crayon rather than Solidworks.
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I think that's an incredibly ignorant and hostile read, frankly. It's a manifold of human behaviors manifesting as something you're painting with a large brush. In the largest stroke, if you have any empathy and a competent theory of mind, you understand it's simple identity protectionism. People attach their identities to their methodologies and tools, and are generally close-minded. I like to think of it like an energy saving trait hardwired into the human mind, even if it's a little bit annoying.
The behavior also isn't unique to programming at all. You can observe it in the various engineering fields. As a single example, in civil engineering you have the conflict between allowable stress design or load and resistance factor design. You even see the behavior in fields like medicine. Different doctors have different views on different methodologies, treatments, etc.
Ascribing it to the "youth" of programming as a field is strange, not just because of its observability in older professions, but because the things you're complaining about are things that emerged as the field got more mature.
I think there's a serious self-flagellation problem some programmers have for themselves after being talked down to by other fields that you're exemplifying here. There's nothing particularly unique about the social dynamics of programming.
Well, put forward your tool-chain and we'll start insulting immediately
Basically all text editors now do syntax highlighting, I have not heard any one say they avoid syntax high-lighting. I personally avoid the usual auto complete interface style and stick with the emacs default of explicitly requesting the editor to completion at point, not because it can't do it or that I am being macho but because I find it distracting and find it obscures code I often want to look at.
I hate with passion GUI's that stop be copying text and other crack that modern IDE's often do.
I don't avoid modern features at all and actively use pretty much all of them. If something like and IDE works for you that's great. But their is not some deep psychological need I am fulfilling, other then using tools that have less friction for me.
Additionally the post is about haskell a very high level language with the type system being the main feature, this persons choice in emacs is clearly different to the type that shun type systems and GC. Additionally I do not actually think the types that shun GC and shun type systems intersect as much as you make out, the types that shun GC are performance obsessed kinds of people in which type systems can improve performance significantly and those that shun type systems are (a dying breed) tend to be those who like scripting languages and hacking something together quickly. Most people recognize that both have their place I think.
Maybe the example of a carpenter who has a set of trusted tools and might like or a chefs set of knives, if we really need to look at other professions and measure are self against them. I think if you ask people why they use text editors (or IDE's) they will give their own valid reasons for each.